Last December, human rights advocates and Google employees cheered when they learned that internal dissent at Google had killed the company’s secret plan to launch a search tool in China
that would censor results to the specifications set out by state
censors, and collect detailed histories of search activity that could be
turned over to authorities hunting for dissidents.

But a leaked confidential memo written by Caesar Sengupta – a manager
on “Project Dragonfly” – reveals that the Chinese search tool has been
kept alive by billing its workers to other projects in the organization;
and indeed, the code repositories for the Chinese tools have been
vigorously updated since then, with 500 check-ins in December and 400
more since then, approximately the same number of commits to those repos
while the project was still under active development.

It’s not clear what’s going on here, and since Google’s senior
management have refused to publicly commit to canceling the project and
staying out of bed with Chinese political censors and secret police,
many googlers are worried that they have been hoodwinked – after all,
Project Dragonfly was kept secret from the start in order to avoid an
employee backlash.

I just read an article about period tracking apps selling data to employers about which employees are trying to get pregnant, does your tracker app, Spot On, sell data from users?

No, Planned Parenthood will never share or sell your Spot On data to anyone, ever.

The data you put into Spot On is all stored locally on your phone, so no one but you has access to it — not even our developers. Your health information belongs to you, and we take your privacy seriously.

There are a lot of period trackers out there, but Spot On is the only one that comes from the most trusted provider of sexual and reproductive health care in the country. We’ve been helping people understand their bodies, menstrual cycles, and birth control for more than century. The Spot On app is all about guidance, tips, and facts from Planned Parenthood’s experts so you can have personalized support right on your phone.

Hacking Team (previously)
was an Italian cybermercenary company that sold surveillance tools to
the world’s most vicious autocrats and dictators, only to collapse when
all of its internal documents were hacked and dumped online by an
unknown person who claimed to be motivated by a desire to expose their
complicity in human rights abuses including torture and murder.

The Hacking Team mercenaries keep turning up anew in rebranded startups,
but anyone who was involved with Hacking Team should be permanently
disqualified from any role involving information security, the same way
that ex-KGB officers should be permanently disqualified from roles in
politics or policing (yeah, I know).

The latest group of Hacking Team war criminals to find themselves
reaccepted into polite society is the staff of Neutrino, a startup
acquired by the cryptocurrency company Coinbase, to do forensic tracking
of blockchain transactions.

Many Coinbase users have concluded that they do not want to entrust
their finances to a company that includes these unsavory characters, and
so was born the #DeleteCoinbase movement to coordinate divestiture from the company.

However, Coinbase will only allow you to delete your account if it has a
zero balance, free of “dust” (infinitesimal residues left behind from
fractional cryptocurrency transactions) and users are finding it
impossible to rid themselves of their dust, which Coinbase insists is
merely an accident and nothing to do with not wanting disgruntled users
to leave.

Sony Pictures Imageworks has made the color management tool OpenColorIO—which was used to create the recent hit animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—available to the open source community. The tool has now become the second software project of the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a Linux Foundation-owned open source association.

In addition to Into the Spider-Verse, OpenColorIO has been used in the production of such other films as Hotel Transylvania 3, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Alice and Wonderland.

Writing on Techcrunch, Zack Whittaker (previously)
calls out the timeworn phrase “we take your privacy and security
seriously,” pointing out that this phrase appears routinely in company
responses to horrific data-breaches, and it generally accompanied by conduct
that directly contradicts it, such as stonewalling and minimizing
responsibility for breaches and denying their seriousness. “We take your
privacy and security seriously” is really code for “Please stop asking
us to take your privacy and security seriously.”

Thankfully, Europeans aren’t taking this lying down. With the final vote
expected to come during the March 25-28 session, mere weeks before
European elections, European activists are pouring the pressure onto
their Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), letting them know that
their vote on this dreadful mess will be on everyone’s mind during the
election campaigns.

The epicenter of the uprising is Germany, which is only fitting, given
that German MEP Axel Voss is almost singlehandedly responsible for
poisoning the Directive with rules that will lead to mass surveillance
and mass censorship, not to mention undermining much of Europe’s tech
sector.

The German Consumer Association were swift to condemn the Directive, stating:
“The reform of copyright law in this form does not benefit anyone, let
alone consumers. MEPs are now obliged to do so. Since the outcome of the
trilogue falls short of the EU Parliament’s positions at key points,
they should refuse to give their consent.”

A viral video
of Axel Voss being confronted by activists has been picked up by
politicians campaigning against Voss’s Christian Democratic Party in the
upcoming elections, spreading to Germany’s top TV personalities, like
Jan Böhmermann.